Still More Swill From ABC

"One of the agents, Thomas E. Nicoletti, was hired by the producers of the mini-series in July 2005 to oversee its technical accuracy, but left after less than a month because of scenes he believed were misleading or just false.
"There were some of the scenes that were total fiction," said Mr. Nicoletti, who served as a supervisory special agent and a member of the joint terrorism task force before retiring in 2003. "I told them unless they were changing this, I could not have my name associated with it." [...]
Dan Coleman, who retired from the F.B.I. in 2004, said he also was concerned when he read the script last summer after being approached by producers about being a technical advisor.
"They sent me the script, and I read it and told them they had to be kidding," Mr. Coleman said. "I wanted my friends at the F.B.I. to still speak to me."
Coleman's the money quote here. He was one of John O'Neill's key aides. In Wright's book, there's a picture of them hugging at O'Neill's going-away party from the Bureau. These aren't lefty noisemakers. They're guys who were there. ABC is doing something really shameful here.

UPDATE: This actually IS from a lefty noisemaker -- and the son of one of the most obnoxious Clinton/Blair loyalists I can think of -- but it seems fairly well reported.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/discover-the-secret-right_b_29015.html

Dear FB: The board of Disney can spend the next two years wondering how many terrorist red alerts will shut down the Orlando airport during school vacation weeks during the Hillary Clinton administration.
They can also ponder pending copyright legislation under a Democratic congress. Two, three, many Mickey Mouses!

Michael --
Your faith in the Democratic Party's ability for subtle political vengeance is touching. I wish I shared it.
And, anyway, TV says people already have cancelled some DisneyWorld vacations over this. Maybe this thing won't run, after all.

UPDATE -- The frog-DNA filling in the gaps of this movie is taken from a novel by this guy, who used to work for ABC but who now has na new job with new bosses.
http://www.fbi.gov/libref/executives/miller.htm

"The Path to 9/11" gives the impression that, as president, Clinton never took bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States and the West seriously enough. And that is simply the unvarnished, undeniable truth.

William Rivers Pitt offers a thorough listing of the actions the previous administration did take, so I won't cut and paste. But I found this paragraph poignant:

Clinton's dire public warnings about the threat posed by terrorism, and the actions taken to thwart it, went completely unreported by the media, which was far more concerned with stained dresses and baseless Drudge Report rumors. When the administration did act militarily against bin Laden and his terrorist network, the actions were dismissed by partisans within the media and Congress as scandalous "wag the dog" tactics. The news networks actually broadcast clips of the movie "Wag the Dog" while reporting on his warnings, to accentuate the idea that everything the administration said was contrived fakery.

Click to expand...

I went to Pitt's column for expediency; many of the reports, memos and legislation are readily available. This stuff is really not that hard to look up, as are the instances in which Clinton probably dropped the ball. (However, wasn't it Bush who said, "We have to be successful every time. The terrorists have to be successful just once.")

But "Clinton did nothing" is the Beltway/media script du jour, and the deep thinkers in our Washington press corps would rather recite that than do their homework.

And if the AQ threat and the warnings in the late-'90s were so transparent -- I'm sure I could go to the Post's archives and find dozens of Podhoretz columns about it, right? -- I wonder if John thinks this is an example of not taking "bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States and the West seriously enough":

RICE: I remember very well that the president was aware that there were issues inside the United States. He talked to people about this. But I don't remember the al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about.

BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

RICE: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."